A Break From Politics

This blog started out to be a place where I could talk about anything, and over time it has sort of evolved into "All Politics, All The Time".

However, today my son Liam did something notable that makes me very happy, and so I thought I'd take a moment to document it: He sang with me and matched my pitches.

Liam is a reluctant speaker, he speaks a lot of nonsense words, but generally only speaks in monosyllables (occasionally two syllables). "Bye". "Hi". "Stop it".

However, he'll often repeat back what we ask him to repeat. A common set is the alphabet, and when he doesn't wish to repeat back a new word, sometimes we'll make a game of it, A, B, C, D, Cow, F, G, H, Moo, ... etc. (That was an example from last week, when we were trying to get him to name a cow and answer the question "What does the cow say"). Another common one is to repeat back one word at a time "I love you Daddy".

So in the car today I decided to try an octave, mostly just hoping to hear different words from him (Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do), but I noticed that he seemed to be matching my pitch as he repeated them back.

Of course, he's got an extremely limited range, so if I'm not very careful to start it at the right place he runs out of notes before we run out of octave, but the impressive thing is that when I'm within his range he's right on the note more often than he's not, which is unusual for a child this young (two and a half, for those who have lost count).

Does this mean he'll be some sort of vocal prodigy? Who knows. But I do hope it means that sooner rather than later he'll be singing along with me, and that's pretty cool.

Liam (the elder).